Things Are Starting to Shape Up!

Hey Guys and Gals!

This has been a very productive week at CURVE for me–mainly through discussions, meetings, and presentations. The idea that struck a chord with me: discussing future ideas of blending 3D virtual environments with literary and historical narratives. Brennan, a SIF director, inspired me to really start brainstorming the potential of this kind of project. His idea was to reconstruct a block of Georgia State’s campus from a past time period–to see what it looked like before our campus was built–the people and lives. My idea is to use a game engine, Unity3D, to first create this past city block–and then work with other SIFs with different backgrounds to help build an interactive experience, building upon ideas of gamification to make the educational aspect truly engaging–not idle like a museum.

Museums, although interesting, suffer the same problems that any ‘public’ space has; these spaces promote ‘public involvement’ rather than public engagement. The public is allowed to be involved–but not directly engaged with the process. So the questions are: How can we take a reconstructed environment–much like a display at a museum–and make it engaging? Are people simply allowed to interact with the virtual environment or can they manipulate it? How can they manipulate it? Can the user offer their own narrative experience outside the one provided? How can this environment pull the user into it–make one feel a part of the surroundings–rather than outside of them?

I think the answer isn’t a simple one–but I think achievable through hard work and collaboration. I’m going to be thinking about these questions more in the coming weeks as I start to build a platform within the engine to tinker with. Next week I’d like to post on gamification, what that term means, and how it can be applied to this specific project. If you’ve played Farmville, Candy Crush, or World of Warcraft–you already know without knowing. It’s a fascinating sub-field of Game Theory used by advertising campaigns and just about everything attempting to make money at this point–but we’ll start getting into that next week. I will split it into two separate posts–a small series and follow up with my ideas on Civic Engagement versus Public Involvement and how gamification can potentially take Civic Engagement to levels not previously possible before the Digital Age.

Cheers,

Robert